MAGIC         PORK

I have no problem with people stealing images from my site. Most of them I’ve stolen from other sites. However, when I steal an image, I copy it over to my server, so that it’s being pulled from magicpork.com. I don’t have the image link to another site. When you do that, you’re using up the bandwidth of the other site because even though it looks like the image is on your site, every time someone loads your site, it’s actually loading the image from the other site’s server.

Well there are plenty of other people that aren’t that considerate or else don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. I can bring up some statistics about my site so I know there are a bunch of sites referring to me that have no reason whatsoever to have a link to magicpork.com.

I first discovered this a long time ago when I posted an entry with a picture of the New Mexico flag - which of course I grabbed from somewhere else. I was wondering why someone’s MySpace page was linking to that image. Every time you post a comment on a friend’s MySpace page you can include an image with your profile and this guy was using the flag image and directly linking to my site every time he posted a comment! I contacted him and asked that he please just make a copy of the image so that he wasn’t using my bandwidth. I didn’t hear back from him and when I checked a few days later he hadn’t changed it yet. I didn’t check again and just gave up. It’s not like my site gets so many hits that it slows it down.

But now there’s a lot of people linking to my images. I look through the referrer list and scratch my head as to why a particular site would be linking to me. If it’s a legitimate link, like “hey check out this AWESOME website” then I have no problem with that. But no, it’s just someone stealing an image, probably after finding it through a Google Images search.

The most popular ones are without a doubt the pictures I took of toilet paper. Those I did take myself. Everything from a blog entry about what I was talking about, how to load the toilet paper - to some sports site saying “Orioles 6, Yankees 3″ and the caption “CRAP!” - to some Dutch site with the phrase “Doet me een beetje hier aan denken”, whatever that means - to a site saying “All Hail The New Currency In Jail”. People loooove the toilet paper.

Back when I was first starting MagicPork, I was talking with my friend Pat of patandfran.com and he was saying that people would do this to him. He said he was tempted to just change the image on them to something really raunchy so that it would show up on their site that way unless they stopped linking to it. Now I see his frustration.

That would be funny, but would also mean I’d have to change my site to not link to that image. Instead, what I’ve chosen to do is implement a little fix I read about online so that an external site can’t reference an image on my site. Apparently this isn’t a foolproof method, and some browsers may not handle this correctly. So if you have problems viewing the site, let me know. But it seems to work okay for me in Firefox and IE.

Speaking of “let me know”… I’ve never included an email address on magicpork.com. This was intentional because I didn’t want tons of spam. I also didn’t know why a stranger visiting my site would want to email me. But perhaps some people would want to give me feedback but don’t want to post a comment for everyone to see, or they just notice something broken with my site and want to alert me to it. Or you’re from Gillette and want to send me a check for my free advertising.

I already get a lot of spam so I’m just not that concerned any more. In fact most spam that I get now is the comment spam that I’ve talked about before. I should let you know that I delete comments to posts older than a couple months or so without even looking at them. I just delete it because most comment spam I get is to older posts and I get a lot of it. So if you had a legitimate comment to an older post that never made it to the site, that’s what happened.

But I still don’t want extra spam or my numerous obsessed stalker fans having my normal email address, so I’m listing a magicpork one. If you know my email address already, you may continue to use it. Everyone else, you can email me at the address listed on my updated About / Contact page. You’ll also find a picture I just took of myself in my bathroom. Hey, it was the best lighting I could find in my apartment. Oh and… you’re welcome.

Even if we’ve never met before, feel free to drop me an email and let me know what you think of my site. I appreciate feedback. Especially since I’m confident it will all be positive. And of course you can always post a comment - that is, if you’re not too much of a coward!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 8:46 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.